INTERCULTURAL PRAGMATICS AND PROFICIENCY - POLITE NOISES FOR CULTURALAPPROPRIATENESS

This article summarizes a study in the field of German-English interla nguage pragmatics which investigates pragmatic declarative and procedu ral knowledge as realized by routine formulas and conversational strat egies. Language instruction which has the goal of developing metapragm atic declarative knowledge as well as situational/functional (procedur al) knowledge results in real progress toward proficiency, even at the elementary level of language instruction. The results of the empirica l study show a typology of deficits and characteristic pragmatic aspec ts of American learners' German interlanguage. These findings and furt her studies of the pragmatics of the native, target, and interlanguage s of our students will help us successfully teach them to make the rig ht polite noises at the time most interactionally appropriate for achi eving their personal communicative goals in the target language.